Andrew Marvell: Selected Poems

by Andrew Marvell

"Bloomsbury Poetry Classics" are selections from the work of some of our greatest poets. The series is aimed at the general reader rather than the specialist and carries no critical or explanatory apparatus. This can be found elsewhere. In the series, the poems introduce themselves, on an uncluttered page and in a format that is both attractive and convenient. The selections have been made by the distinguished poet, critic and biographer Ian Hamilton. Andrew Marvell was born in Yorkshire in 1621, and came to maturity during the Civil War. It is thought that his first sympathies were royalist, but that, with Cromwell's accession, his views changed. His famous "Horatian Ode" exhibits a deep equivocation which persisted throughout his subsequent political career. He served prominently as a civil servant under Cromwell and later as Member of Parliament for Hull, a post which he held throughout the Restoration until his death in 1678 - a death not perhaps accidental. Marvell's poems were not published until after his death and even then went largely neglected until this century. Modern critics have responded enthusiastically to Marvell as a man of mystery.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1979

About the author

Frequently satirical work of English metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell includes "To His Coy Mistress" and "The Definition of Love," both published posthumously.

A clergyman fathered Andrew Marvell, a parliamentarian. John Donne and George Herbert associated him. He befriended John Milton, a colleague.

The family moved to Hull, where people appointed his father as lecturer at church of Holy Trinity, and where grammar school educated the young Marvell. A secondary school in the city is now named after him.

He most famously composed The Garden , An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland , and the Country House Poem , Upon Appleton House .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_...

Reviews

[Maru Kun · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Buddhist tradition the dew drop is an allegory of the evanescence of our world. The vicissitudes of life are transitory and ephemeral like dewdrops soon to evaporate under the sun. Kobayashi Issa in the eighteenth century wrote a haiku including this image of the dew drop that expressed the difficulty he found in reconciling this Buddhist view of the world with tragedies he had experienced in his own personal life:

露の世は露の世ながらさりながら
tsuyu no yo wa tsuyu no yo nagara sari nagara
This world of dew is just a world of dew, and yet...

...And yet despite such knowledge of the suffering of the world Issa’s own personal suffering was every bit as painful to him.

Dogen, a Buddhist teacher, poet and founder of the Soto school of Zen Buddhism in the thirteenth century, thought of the dewdrop as a symbol of spiritual enlightenment, one that could reflect our whole world:

Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water.
The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken.
Although its light is wide and great,
The moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide.
The whole moon and the entire sky
Are reflected in one dewdrop on the grass.

Marvell’s poem “On A Drop of Dew” written in the seventeenth century and included in this charming volume has strikingly similar images.

For Marvell the dew drop is a microcosm reflecting the whole world and also a symbol of the spirit descending from heaven to abide briefly on earth before evaporating again to return to the celestial realm.

See how the orient dew,
Shed from the bosom of the morn
Into the blowing roses,
Yet careless of its mansion new,
For the clear region where ’twas born
Round in itself incloses:
And in its little globe’s extent,
Frames as it can its native element.
How it the purple flow’r does slight,
Scarce touching where it lies,
But gazing back upon the skies,
Shines with a mournful light,
Like its own tear,
Because so long divided from the sphere.
Restless it rolls and unsecure,
Trembling lest it grow impure,
Till the warm sun pity its pain,
And to the skies exhale it back again.

How remarkable that three poets separated not only by five centuries in time but also by different languages, cultures and modes of thought should all find the same inspiration in their deliberate and profound observation of natural beauty. It would be satisfying to read something of greater spiritual significance into this shared vision - that these three poets all saw in the dew drop an image of their spiritual thought – but I sadly I think this is no more than a charming co-incidence.

But I believe we can say with more certainty that early one morning a young Andrew Marvell walked through a meadow near the home of his youth in Winestead-in-Holderness in East Yorkshire and, in the stillness of that morning, he knelt in that meadow to examine a dew drop left on a small, purple rose - much as one morning four hundred years before Dogen also knelt on the ridge of a rice field planted in the margins of Imperial Kyoto and, while sheltering in the dappled shade of the bamboo ahead of the oppressive heat of the day, picked up a rice stalk and contemplated the delicacy of the dewdrop resting thereon.

Marvell’s father, a clergyman, and Dogen’s father, who may have been a nobleman but who is forgotten to history, will both have watched as each of their sons halted on their morning walk from home, knelt and were still, each boy immersed in their own metaphysic.

Both fathers will, at that same moment, have shared the very same thought - a thought that also transcends space, time, language and culture:

“Why is my son lolling around on the grass like that staring into space? Doesn’t he have some work to do? Shouldn’t he be helping his mother? That boy will come to nothing.”

as some thoughts are truly universal.

Fortunately for us today Andrew Marvell, Dogen and Issa all did come to something, giving us a chance to enjoy their wonderful poetry even in this century and time spent contemplating dew drops isn’t time wasted at all.

[Colin Cloutus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Marvell in his earliest poetry is teeming with vibrant language and many examples of Metaphysical, and comedic, Wit, but later in his life he seems to have lapsed into a rather dry 'stately' form of verse, which is frankly quite boring.
Would maybe read a complete works in a few years time as his output is quite short, but I will treasure the few early poems here that touched me as brilliant.

[J. Alfred · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm probably in some sort of Phillistene minority on this (the guy's famous for a reason) but I thought most of his stuff was meh at best. So many couplets. So many couplets! You know it's a bad sign when you grudgingly accept that you found a good line. The only thing I knew about the guy before reading his stuff was "to his coy mistress" and that remains all that's worth knowing... he's political and sometimes venomous, and just rubs me the wrong way.

[Robert Carey]

Not the Kindle edition; paperback.